IBM has a monumental task ahead in its quest for growth. To meet that goal, IBM needs to be disruptive. There are three disruptive technologies: data, cloud, and mobile. These are exceptionally significant markets, because they are still growing. Data demand is rising, mobile is replacing desktop, and cloud solutions are on the rise.

Cloud

Cloud computing does not stop at hosting applications, analytics, and enterprise solutions online. IBM looks at it in terms of layers, from the data, to the application, and finally to the front layer. IBM Bluemix is unifying the solution by allowing developers to deploy apps across multiple domains.

IBM’s other cloud solutions are starting at a good base. Its analytics, Watson, and secure solutions are growing at around 20 to 30 per cent. Watson gets lots of attention from the industry because IBM wants to advance cognitive analytics. Watson is also about AI (artificial intelligence), whereby the system learns and adapts over time. As more unstructured data is supplied to Watson, more meaningful analyses is output.

It will be some time before industries and enterprises embrace Watson. IBM is still transitioning its existing staff to support this unit. To make sure it is successful, Watson requires good quality data. In the U.S., the company has data sets from healthcare companies including Phytel, Explorys, and Merge Healthcare.

IBM’s trend app is a practical example of Watson in action. The tool attempts to help consumers find the hottest products before they are sold out.

IBM will fit its growing relevance in cloud through PaaS (Platform as a Service). The company views the infrastructure layer of the cloud as capital infrastructure. Conversely, PaaS requires IBM bringing in all the tools related to cloud. This includes analytics, a development environment, all centralized within an accepted platform.

Adhering to security

IBM chose the private cloud infrastructure because at least two big sectors value security highly: financial services and healthcare. Gartner ranked IBM in a leadership position for intrusion prevention systems, in a publication on November 16, 2015.

Mobile

The importance of mobile is clear. Desktop usage fell behind mobile devices (tablets and smart phones) some time ago. IBM partnered with Apple to develop mobile solutions in the enterprise.

Giving back

On November 25, University of Toronto posted that IBM Canada is investing $65 million to Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (SOSCIP).